


When We Go Crashing Down

by earthquaker



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vampire, Anal Sex, Biting, Blood, Blood Drinking, Car Sex, M/M, Vampires, because pynch, this is so self-indulgent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-22
Updated: 2020-11-22
Packaged: 2021-03-09 17:39:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27670114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/earthquaker/pseuds/earthquaker
Summary: Eight years, two weeks and three days since he last saw Adam, the last three of which were the worst of his cursed existence and now, when Ronan’s finally getting himself sorted on his own, he shows up here like he can just slot himself back in again.Adam comes back. Ronan reacts.
Relationships: Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish
Comments: 23
Kudos: 109





	When We Go Crashing Down

**Author's Note:**

> This is so self-indulgent, I can only apologise. Apparently you can move on from your vampire phase, but it never truly leaves you.
> 
> Title is taken from Style by Taylor Swift because I refuse to believe that song is about anything other than sexy vampires. Also I listened Kill All Your Friends by My Chemical Romance about 8 times while writing this.
> 
> Enjoy!

When Ronan hears the footsteps coming up the stairs to the apartment, he knows who it is. The same ancient, primal urge that tells him to hunt, to get blood, to sleep in the day, tells him exactly who is coming up the stairs. The apartment door is locked, but Ronan knows that he knows how to get in anyway.

Sure enough, the sound of the door lifting slightly on its hinges echoes across the building, the sound ringing through the hollow bowels of the ground floor. Ronan doesn’t turn around as he hears him enter, he just continues to squeeze the last few drops of blood from the bag into the glass. He doesn’t know where Gansey gets this from, he doesn’t know whether it’s pig or cow or human and he doesn’t care, so long as the fridge is full. He’s building back up to hunting properly again, but he’s got used to the convenience of bagged blood. He chucks the drained bag in the sink and still doesn’t turn. He can hear the other vampire shuffling about behind him, hears him drop his antiquated duffle bag on the floor, a muffled thump.

“Ronan,” Adam says, softly.

It’s a moment Ronan had been anticipating for years. He’d gone over what to say to Adam again and again in his. Rehearsed anger, sadness, joy, disappointment, anger again. And then, at some point, he can’t remember when, he’d stopped. He accepted Adam was never coming back and forgotten his reactions. Now he’s here, Ronan can’t pin down a single emotion long enough to react and can’t remember what he thought he’d say anyway. So, he doesn’t look at Adam. Can’t look at him, won’t look at him. He lifts the glass to his lips and drains the whole pint in four deep gulps. When he slams it back down on the counter, he does so with such force that fracture lines run up the sides of the glass.

“Ronan, look at me.” Adam is speaking gently, and it almost breaks Ronan, almost makes him turn. But he looks at the fractured glass instead and remembers why he can’t turn to him.

“No,” Ronan says, firmly. “If I look at you, I’ll have to watch you leave again. You shouldn’t have bothered coming back.” _I don’t need you anymore,_ Ronan wants to tell him, but Ronan can’t lie, not to Adam.

“You know why I left. And you knew I was coming back.”

Ronan can’t stand here and listen to him, but Adam is blocking the door. Ronan squeezes his eyes shut instead, crosses the apartment to his room blindly. Once inside, he slams the door shut and throws open the window. He leaps out of it.

The ground floor of Monmouth Manufacturing is at least triple height, so the jump from the first-floor window is long way down but Ronan has made it before. He lands where he has done before, feet slamming into the already cracked asphalt, craters left in his wake.

When he makes it around to the front of the building, he knows that Adam is already there, out of sight in the shadows by the main door of Monmouth. Ronan doesn’t know if he’s staying out of sight on purpose, or if it’s just Adam’s natural instinct to be a creepy bastard.

Eight fucking years. Eight years, two weeks and three days since he last saw Adam, the last three of which were the worst of his cursed existence and now, when Ronan’s finally getting himself sorted on his own, he shows up here like he can just slot himself back in again. Maybe eight years was nothing to Adam. Gansey had once told Ronan that time had started to mean less and less to him, the older he’d gotten. Maybe it was the same for Adam. It wasn’t for Ronan though. He’d felt every minute of those eight years tick by as slowly as if he were mortal.

Ronan almost rips the driver side door off of the BMW; almost dents it when he yanks it shut behind him. He can feel Adam watching him and it makes the sickening swirl of emotion well inside him again. The tyres squeal and the engines roars as he streaks out of the parking lot. He wonders if Adam will still be there when he gets back before sunrise. Ronan decides that he isn’t going to care.

As he’s driving away though, he makes the mistake of looking in his rear-view mirror. Adam is stood on the curb now, half lit by the sickly orange streetlight. On the wall in Monmouth, above Gansey’s desk, pinned in amongst all of Gansey’s maps and memorabilia from his centuries of life, is a sepia photograph of Adam. Ronan doesn’t know when it was taken, if it was from before he was turned or after and he doesn’t recognise the period the clothes Adam is wearing are from. Standing under the streetlight now, Adam looks like he’s stepped right out of that photograph. He looks like a soldier returning from a long war in a distant land. He looks like he’s been told the lover that promised to wait for him has moved on.

Ronan wrenches the car into reverse. The engine screams as he hurtles back down the street to Adam.

“That’s very bad for the engine,” he hears Adam murmur.

“Get in,” he says, without looking up at him. Adam gets in, sliding elegantly into the seat. A complicated storm of emotions swirl in Ronan’s gut at Adam being this close to him after so long. Adam doesn’t say anything else and neither does Ronan, as he hits the accelerator.

The car flies through silent Henrietta streets. Ronan’s vampire reflexes mean he barely ever needs to touch the brake as the car hurtles down narrow side streets and through broad intersections alike. Ronan sees everything they pass both as a blur and in super high definition, simultaneously. Every water droplet clinging to a cold lamppost; an endless smear of anaemic orange light; every leaf on neatly trimmed hedgerows; a galloping blur of green that races the car and then drops away at the next junction. Just under a century of this life and he still can’t fathom how he can see everything all at once and still ignore it all.

It’s an eerily foggy night, and the streetlights wear orange halos of mist. Every traffic light is red, warning of danger and Ronan disregards them all. He wonders if Adam has eaten, if he wants to hunt tonight. Maybe that’s the danger the lights are warning of.

He's seen Adam once now tonight and so he can no longer stop himself from looking again and again. He catalogues every detail in glances when he knows he doesn’t need to see the road. His elegant hands, one casually resting on his thigh, the other tracing over the grain of where the window meets the door. His high cheekbones so delicately carved that Ronan had wondered before if he’d looked so supernaturally ethereal before he’d been turned, or if it was a consequence of his vampirism. Ronan can make out tiny freckles on his skin. Adam has barely seen the sun in decades, but he’ll carry the marks from a human life in its warmth forever. There are four parallel white lines of scar tissue running down the side of his neck, wrapping from the corner of his jaw around to the front of his throat. They look deep and vicious. Anger bubbles up in Ronan. The scars are new and only another vampire could’ve made them.

“I know you don’t think you need to keep your eyes on the road, but I’d rather not be in a wreck tonight,” Adam says.

Ronan snorts. They’re speeding down an empty, rural road now, fields flashing past in a blur. Silence hangs heavy in the car again. Ronan thinks about turning on the stereo, wondering if he can piss Adam off with it enough to start a fight rather than continue _this._

He doesn’t though. He knows what he’s thinking will be enough. “I thought you were dead,” he spits abruptly into the charged atmosphere of the car. “You let me think you were gone forever. That he’d found you and finished you off.” He puts as much venom into his voice as he can. If he shows Adam his true emotions, they’ll both break.

Adam swallows audibly. “I know. I thought about you every day. I don’t know if that helps.”

Ronan laughs bitterly. “You know it doesn’t,” he sneers.

“I did though. Every day, all two thousand nine hundred and thirty-nine of them.”

Ronan’s anger is a visceral, living thing that suddenly explodes inside of him _. If Adam had cared that much, to count every day, why had he not come back sooner?_ He wrenches the steering wheel, throwing the car off the road. They’re going so fast that the car hits the bank and jumps the ditch at the side of the road. They crash through a fence and the car bounces across a dry, lumpy field. The car stutters over the rocky, craggy ground and finally into a large lump of mud, hard as concrete.

Adam’s staring distantly out the front window. “That’s definitely fucked your suspension,” he says, as if commenting on the weather.

Crashing the car has done nothing to tamp down Ronan’s frustration. “I don’t care about the fucking suspension; I don’t care about the damn car. I care about _you._ I care about the fact that one day you just decided to up and leave and never came back. _”_

“I—” Adam starts, but Ronan’s already had enough of his logic to last the rest of this century.

“I wasn’t mad at first. You’d left before and I knew you’d come back. But then you didn’t, and you didn’t, and you didn’t. You’d never been gone that long before. I didn’t know if you were dead, or if you just didn’t care anymore. And then Niall was murdered. And you still didn’t come back. I needed you then, and you _weren’t there.”_ He doesn’t shout, he knows cold anger will hurt Adam more.

He focuses on that, how he wants to hurt Adam because if he even strays from that desire then he’ll be overwhelmed with how much he wants to _hold_ Adam. How badly he just _wants_ him.

Adam’s looking at him now, his eyes are soft and sad. “I did call. I called Gansey when I heard about your father. But I had to be careful, he was so close to me and I was so close to him. If I tried to come back, I’d have led him right to Henrietta. If I’d called you, he could’ve found you. Is that what you wanted, some murderous, blood-crazed vampire, after you because he knows it’ll hurt me, on top of losing your father.” Adam’s voice is steady but he’s desperately trying to make Ronan see his reasoning. Ronan can’t yet. His father, his sire, the man who’d given him the only family he’d ever known, had been brutally killed three years ago. The cold hand of grief had been wrapped around Ronan’s dead heart since. He could feel its fingers crawling up his throat now, as memories of Niall’s charred remains flashed through his mind.

“At least you would have been there,” Ronan whispers, closing his eyes. He rests his head back against the seat, hands finally dropping away from the steering wheel. The engine is still running but neither of them care.

“I wanted to come back. But if I’d come then I wouldn’t have been able to leave again. And you know I couldn’t stay anywhere while he was still out there. I couldn’t be safe, and neither could anyone I cared about. I didn’t want you to get hurt.”

Ronan’s eyes fly open at that. “Well I fucking did anyway,” he snarls. “Didn’t you ever stop to think for a second that you didn’t _have_ to do it alone?” Ronan can’t stop the emotion creeping in his voice now, can’t stop it from shaking. The memory of the moment he realised what Adam had gone to do surged to the front of his mind. Adam had left and he hadn’t told Ronan or Gansey he was going, had made sure there was no way they could follow him. He’d left to fight a battle that he thought was his alone. For decades, the vampire that had created Adam had hunted him, had never let Adam stay anywhere too long. The vampire, Adam’s sire, had created Adam accidentally, thinking he’d drained him dry and not realising that some of his own blood had passed to Adam in the process. The vampire (Ronan didn’t know his name and he didn’t think Adam did either) had attempted to correct his mistake on many occasions but Adam’s survival instincts were strong.

“You promised me you’d stay,” Ronan continues. The memory of the night before Adam had left is bittersweet. They’d been lying back on the roof of Monmouth, staring up at the entire sprawl of the Milky Way painting the sky above them. ‘ _I’m going to stay with you forever,’_ Adam had breathed into the night. Ronan had laughed, relaxed and happy; after decades of restlessness, finally, all of his stars were aligned. But when he’d woken the next evening, Adam was gone. And then everything had gone to shit.

Adam was staring at his hands now, palms up, fingers spread wide, as if the answer to Ronan’s question was written on them. “How could I carry on if he’d hurt you and it was my fault? I left so many times because I had to keep him away from Henrietta. I could never settle as long as he was still trying to destroy me. I’d been running from him for too long, but you made me want to fight him. I told myself that I would find him and when I did only one of us would walk away.” Adam’s jaw is tightly clenched, and Ronan can see the muscle jumping in it.

“And?” he asks, although he already knows the answer.

Adam looks at him, eyes burning. “There was a point, where he must’ve realised I was hunting him. When I found him, he told me he knew I’d be the one to destroy him. The only vampire he’d accidentally made, the one with strong enough survival instinct to kill their sire. It’s why he abandoned me, hoping I’d die on my own, and when I didn’t, why he hunted me, hoping he’d be able to kill me before I found something to fight for. A reason to really want him dead. When I found him, he ‑‑”

“Did this to you?” Ronan lifts his hand and lightly traces the scars on Adam’s neck with his fingers.

Adam nods. “And I tore his head off. Tore him apart, burned the pieces. Destroyed him.” Adam’s words are cold and clinical, like the act didn’t affect him at all. Ronan can’t imagine how he can be that way about it. The bond between a sire and their progeny is strong, family ties on a primal level. Niall had been a truer father to him than his biological father and Declan and Matthew were more his brothers than anyone he might have shared DNA with. But that bond had never been given a chance between Adam and his sire. Maybe it could never have formed; his sire had wanted Adam dead before he’d even been turned. Ronan wondered if Adam had even felt his death at all.

Silence follows. Ronan finally turns the engine off and the silence becomes even weightier. Ronan hates being left to think about his feelings, would always rather act on instinct, but now he tries to think like Adam. He takes what Adam has said and follows his meaning; finds the words he means but hasn’t said. If Adam’s sire is dead, Adam doesn’t have to run from him anymore. It’s remarkable, how quickly Adam-logic can quell Ronan’s anger.

And then, “I will stay with you forever, if you still want me. If you can forgive me,” Adam says.

Ronan grins, sharp and wicked. “You’re asking for me to forgive you? Already? Ask me in eight years, asshole. You can spend them making it up to me.” The need to touch Adam is twisting low in Ronan’s gut now. He hopes Adam can feel the change.

When their dark eyes meet across the car, it feels as though all the air vanishes. It doesn’t matter, neither of them needs to breath, and they aren’t, both vampires sat just watching each other across a distance that’s closer than they’ve been in years and yet still feels achingly far. Ronan can feel the ghost of his heart hammering in chest. Impossible, he knows, but Adam has always made him feel painfully mortal.

“Have you eaten?” he asks Adam.

“Is that an offer?” Adam replies. He’s grinning now, a feral grin, fire burning in his eyes. If Ronan had any resolve left in him about holding out from Adam, it’s in pieces now.

He’s across the car and in Adam’s lap before he’s even thought about. They’re kissing ferociously; Adam’s mouth is hard against Ronan’s and Ronan kisses back just as hard. For a moment, the kiss is just lips, sliding hot and wet against each other. Adam’s hands are moving frantically over Ronan’s body, like he can’t keep them in one place too long. They grip his hips hard, his fingers dig into his ribs, he pulls Ronan harder into the kiss by the back of his neck, he cups his jaw, runs his fingers over his buzzed head.

Ronan tangles his fingers in Adam’s hair and when he pulls, Adam snarls against his mouth. Ronan slides his tongue in then, licking sinfully into Adam’s mouth. Ronan kisses him, bruisingly, and Adam sucks on his tongue when he gets the chance. Ronan throws every emotion into the kiss, the anger at Adam for leaving, the anger at his audacity to come back, his fear, his joy.

When Adam’s teeth catch his lip, Ronan moans imploringly. Adam sucks Ronan’s lower lip into his mouth and he bites down on it, not gently. Ronan tastes his own blood, welling up between them and gasps as Adam licks it away then sucks on his lick again to draw more to the surface. Adam licks the blood from his mouth again and again and Ronan can’t do anything but pant open mouthed and let Adam take from him. He wonders if Adam can taste the emotions in his blood.

Finally, Ronan pulls Adam off him with the fist tangled in his hair, tilting his head back. He looks down at Adam and something dark and primal stirs inside him when he sees the scars on Adam’s throat again. He wants to bite Adam over them, like he can erase what his sire did. Like he can claim him. Adam’s looking back up at him and his pupils are blown wide with lust. There’s blood already smeared all around his mouth and he’s baring his fangs at Ronan like he knows exactly what he’s thinking. He’s a wild, feral, beautiful, untameable thing. It’s a stupid thought, to think anyone could claim Adam Parrish.

Ronan kisses him again anyway, and Adam’s own lip splits between their teeth this time. He can taste that Adam has fed recently and he can taste something that’s so _Adam_ that his desperation surges inside him. Ronan’s on his way to painfully hard now and he digs his nails into Adam’s shoulders as he grinds down to where he can feel Adam’s cock hard beneath him. He wants to feel Adam inside of him, wants everything Adam can give him.

“Wait, wait, wait,” Adam garbles suddenly. He reaches for the door, and all but kicks it open, scrambling out from underneath Ronan.

“What?” Ronan tries to temper his panic. Does Adam not want him like this anymore?

“I’ve had this coat since 1935, I’m not about to let you tear it apart,” Adam says, belligerently. He’s stood in the dark field, taking his long wool coat off and carefully folding it.

Ronan splutters a laugh and then rolls his eyes. “Honestly, Parrish, you never change.” He contemplates the rest of Adam’s clothes from the passenger seat. It’s dark in the field, but supernatural senses mean the car’s internal light is enough. “What about that ugly vest, can I tear that apart?” He grins ferociously, baring his fangs at Adam.

Adam looks down at his tweed vest, frowns, and then starts to remove that too. Ronan has to bite back a laugh at the ridiculous juxtaposition of Adam Parrish: blood drying around his mouth, in a dark field by a crashed car, delicately unbuttoning his vest and then his shirt as carefully as he would anywhere else.

“You’re really going to just strip right there?” Ronan asks, smirking at Adam, as he starts to work on his trousers.

“Yes, and then I’m going to come over there and I’m going to tear all your clothes off of you because I know you don’t care,” he says, darkly.

A thrill of arousal shoots through Ronan. He vaults over the console into the backseats while Adam’s leaving his neatly folded clothes on the front seat. Ronan lays back on the seats, legs spread invitingly. When Adam opens the back door and crawls in over him, the look on his face can only be described as predatory. He’s completely naked now and Ronan takes the opportunity to catalogue more details. More freckles, more scars, ones he recognises and ones he doesn’t. Adam’s flushed, red cock, curved up towards his stomach. That, he definitely recognises.

“I want you so much. I meant it when I said I’d thought of you every day,” Adam says as he noses down the column of Ronan’s throat.

“I want you to fuck me,” Ronan breathes, as Adam kisses at his neck. 

“Yeah,” Adam all but growls. His hands are twisted in Ronan’s tank top and it does rip as he strips it off. “Turn over, I want to see it.”

Ronan realises then that Adam hasn’t seen his tattoo. He’d got it done in New York, six months after Niall’s death and the artist who’d done it, a vampire himself, had been experimenting with tattooing vampires. He’d used silver needles and it had burned like a bitch. It was the most painful thing Ronan had experienced since he’d been turned but it had been cathartic and really, the pain had been nothing compared to losing his father.

“Fuck, Ronan.” Adam’s long fingers are tracing the whorls and swooping lines of his tattoo. “It’s so beautiful, you’re so beautiful.” His tongue follows his fingers and Ronan moans loudly at the contrast between Adam’s cold fingers and his warm tongue. There are so many things he wants to say to Adam, wants to tell him how he’s missed him, how he mad he is that he left, how sad he is that Adam thought he had to fight alone. He wants to tell Adam how he doesn’t have to be alone again, but the words are getting stuck in his throat and the only sounds that he can manage are shaky moans as Adam continues his path down Ronan’s back.

He’s pulled Ronan’s jeans down now and Ronan gasps as Adam laves hot, wet kisses on his arse, fingers spreading his cheeks and his tongue following to lick maddeningly against his hole. It’s wet and it’s so dirty and it feels so good that Ronan nearly sobs with relief. He kicks his jeans off, trying not to kick Adam in the process. There’s not enough space and he’s already torn the upholstery, biting at it when Adam’s tongue breached him. Adam is contorted around, half kneeling in the footwell to get at Ronan, but he doesn’t seem to care. His teeth scrape threateningly against the meat of Ronan’s arse and Ronan almost begs him to bite down.

“There’s lube in the glove box,” he pants. Adam leans into the front to reach it and Ronan turns back over, sitting so his back is against the door. He runs a hand down Adam’s bare arse and when Adam turns back to him, he pulls him in by his hips. Adam’s mouth crashes into his again and they’re kissing again, harder than before and with a raw, animal desire Ronan has never experienced anywhere other than with Adam. Their cocks slide together, velvety smooth skin slicked by precum. Adam grinds down into the contact, making both of them groan.

“Bite me,” Ronan grits out into Adam’s mouth. Adam doesn’t respond immediately. He keeps kissing him and then slides his mouth away from Ronan’s lips and kisses along his jaw. He kisses hard at the side of his neck, sucking hard at the skin there, but not biting down. Adam continues to the point where Ronan’s neck meets his shoulder and then he sets his teeth to the meaty flesh there. When he bites down, Ronan cries out, but it’s not with pain.

Adam sucks hard at the bite, blood flowing to the surface. It doesn’t pulse out, like it would if he were human, but the comes to the surface sluggishly when Adam sucks. Ronan feels every suck all through his body, like a thousand tiny strings are pulling taunt inside him. He’s so focussed on Adam’s teeth biting into him again that he doesn’t notice Adam’s slick finger inside him until it brushes against his prostate. Every nerve ending in his body sings at that and Ronan bites down hard on the thin skin at Adam’s collarbone.

When he licks Adam’s blood away, he can taste himself now too, mixed in with Adam. It ratchets up the arousal inside him to another level. Adam’s got two fingers pumping vigorously into him now and every other time he enters him, he twists them just so and Ronan’s body lights up.

“Fuck, I’m ready Adam. Fucking fuck me,” he pants. Adam lifts his head from Ronan’s shoulder and Ronan almost comes already from how Adam looks. His eyes are so wide with lust, for sex and for blood, that only the tiniest ring of blue is visible. There’s blood smeared from his perfect cheekbones, right down his neck and across his chest. But he’s looking at Ronan with passion burning in his eyes and a look on his face that says _I can’t believe I get this._ His skin is almost flushed pink and his lips, beneath the blood, are plush and pink. _He makes a mockery of death_ , Ronan thinks, wildly. Any hunter that says vampires are unholy monsters, outside of God, had never seen Adam Parrish like this.

They’re dead. They’re supernatural animals, running around in bodies that should have been corpses long ago. But Ronan has never felt more alive than how he feels when Adam finally pushes his cock inside him. There’s blood on the car seats, and Ronan’s got one leg thrown over Adam’s shoulder and the other hooked on the front passenger seat. Adam’s gripping the frame of the car above them so hard that he’ll leave behind a dent and the only leverage he’s getting is from his one foot planted in the footwell. But it’s the best fuck Ronan’s ever had. Adam’s cock is rocking deep inside him and every inch of his body is alight. Adam’s fingers push into his mouth and Ronan moans around them, desire for Adam to fill him in every way possible overwhelming him. He wants Adam in every way he can have him.

“Fuck, how could I forget how much you like to suck on my fingers while I fuck you? How could I have not remembered how you like me filling your greedy mouth while I take you?” Adam’s voice is rough, and he’s so turned on that his long-buried Southern accent creeps into his voice. It drips like honey into Ronan’s ears and he sucks harder at Adam’s fingers. There’s blood sliding down Adam’s chest from the bite on his collarbone and Adam pulls his fingers from Ronan’s mouth to wipe it up with them. When he puts them back in Ronan’s mouth, Ronan almost sobs at the frenzy the taste of the blood sparks inside of him.

Adam is fucking him erratically now, hips slamming into Ronan, all sense of rhythm lost. He wraps a hand around Ronan’s cock and jacks his cock, as hard as he’s fucking him, and faster.

“Wanna feel you come apart on my cock. Please, Ronan,” he begs. Ronan is all too happy to oblige. Adam fucks into him hard again and squeezes his cock at the same time.

When Ronan comes, it splatters right up his chest, all over his twitching stomach muscles. Adam groans at the feeling of Ronan clenching around him and Ronan feels Adam’s cock pulse deep inside him as he comes.

There’s blood and cum all over both of them and all over the car. When Adam’s cock slides out of him, Ronan winces at the rush of cum that follows onto the seat. They’re both panting a little, even though there’s no need. Adam sits back against the opposite door to Ronan, and Ronan turns so he can rest his head on Adam’s chest.

“Don’t suppose you have any wipes in here?” Adam asks him.

“No, Parrish. It’s not like I planned for filthy car sex.”

“You had lube,” Adam retorts. He reaches onto the floor and pulls up Ronan’s torn and discarded tank top. He wipes at Ronan’s stomach with it. The bites Adam left on him are already scabbed over, halfway to completely healed.

He scrunches his nose up at the ruined top. “What the fuck am I supposed to wear home? It’s November, it’s cold.”

Adam looks at him witheringly. “You’re a vampire. You don’t get cold.”

“Why do you wear that coat then?” It’s an old argument and it makes Ronan grin like an idiot.

“I like that coat; I have good memories associated with that coat,” Adam sniffs.

Ronan just laughs at him and passes him the ruined top to wipe himself with.

A little while later, when they’re still lying across the backseat, Ronan traces the scars on Adam’s throat again. Adam starts talking. “That’s why it’s been three years. It took a year after I heard about your father to find him, six months after that to heal. And then…” Ronan feels him swallow. “I was looking into who killed your father.”

“What?” Ronan is startled by this. “It was hunters. Declan said it had to have been.”

Adam snorts derisively; it’s an acutely inelegant sound from someone normally so controlled. “And you believed that? Hunters? Really? So they break into the most well protected nest in the western US in the early evening, find one vampire awake and kill him but leave the other four sleeping soundly inside.”

Ronan has already acknowledged this detail but tried not to think on it too much. He grinds his teeth. It’s a bad habit, not that he cares. “What did you find?” He knows Adam knows vampire hunters. Had worked with them to track his sire. It’s another thing Ronan doesn’t like to think too much about. Instead he thinks about what Adam could have found. Would he have come back if he hadn’t found anything? Or would he have come back only if he had?

“Not a lot, but I think your brother knows more than he wants to tell you. It’s nothing that will keep me away though. I came back for you, dumbass. I know what you’re thinking.”

“You think another vampire killed Niall then? Or got a hunter to do it?”

“Hmm. It’s a possibility. Sunrise is in an hour. We need to shift the car.”

 _End of that conversation then,_ Ronan thinks, bitterly. Adam’s talking around something, but Ronan doesn’t bother to push any more. The sky is beginning to incrementally lighten.

“Are you coming back to Monmouth?” he asks as Adam starts to get dressed again.

Adam nods. “If you’ll have me.”

“Obviously. Gansey’ll be pleased to see you. I doubt he even knows how long you’ve been gone.” Ronan pulls his jeans and boots back on but doesn’t bother with anything else. Adam’s right, he won’t get cold.

“He’s not on his ‘time is meaningless and everything is happening all at once’ bullshit still is he?” Adam’s impeccably dressed again now, not a drop of blood in sight, human disguise back in place. Ronan wonders if his own human disguise is as unsettling as Adam’s. 

“If anything, he’s getting worse. He’s started hanging out with witches.” They’re standing at either end of the car now. Ronan hopes that no humans drive past and see them carrying the car back on to the road.

“Is he still looking for his slumbering vampire King?”

“Who? Welsh Dracula? Of course he is, he’s not giving that one up. Hence, the witches.” They’re back in the car now and Adam’s smiling at him, calm and relaxed. The engine stutters a little as it he turns the ignition, but there’s no more problems as they race the sunrise back to Monmouth.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought! I really appreciate kudos and comments make me want to write more!  
> I don't currently have any more plans/ideas to write about this verse, but I do have a lot of headcanons and thoughts about it, not all of which I managed to work into this fic. If you want to hear about any of them, then drop me a message on Tumblr at [behindtheatlantic](https://behindtheatlantic.tumblr.com)! Once again, thanks for reading!!!


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